The Grand Hotel Bulgaria is no place for a confidential meeting. Windowed with vast, paneless sheets of glass, the long, shallow interior of its ground floor cafe is an architectural homage to lapidoptery cases. Immediately outside lies the mouth of a ceremonial square, paved in shiny artificial stone some pre-revolutionary wit chose in ideologically suspect ochre. I used to march across it as a child, white-gloved, in paramilitary formation, carrying the flag for the local branch of the socialist-youth movement whose membership it was then social suicide to decline. The ceremonial season coincided with the migration of the swallows, preparatorily swarming in huge vortices above our heads, pissing on our parade—I remember noting with some relief—only metaphorically. The chaos of the swallows, if nothing of their energy, now displaced the old order on the ground, paracivilian crowds trickling past the hotel windows in steps politics had long lost the power to synchronise.

That a passer-by, rendered faceless in the retinal afterburn of the flash, should casually press her camera against the window to photograph us point-blank was, I suppose, surprising only in the implication someone still cared about that time, even if not enough to observe the basic manners of surveillance. Zhivata had invited me out to tea, our first meeting since so deep in my early childhood he existed in my mind only as an abstract fact. He had spent most of my life in prison, precipitated there by a political chain reaction whose residue would ordinarily have been extinction. Released in the velvet revolutions of the 90s, he had since stayed in the shade, socially, politically. Now my father’s death had given him an urge to see me, searching for a glimmer of the dead in the nearest living.

Were faces rock, Zhivata’s would be obsidian: hard, compressed volcanic energy, surface-chipped over decades of conflict but fundamentally unbroken and unbreakable. The last of a long line of fighters reborn over half a millennium of near-continuous insurgency, he had naturally assumed the best position for a rebel: deep inside the secret parts of the citadel. A social order built on nonsense needs policing with opacity, for what one cannot rationally justify one needs to cloak in darkness. The natural sense of injustice cannot then gain a foothold in any concrete example, and simply slides back down into a well of formless anxiety.

Consciously or not, this is the power Zhivata naturally sought, for it was the kind that here mattered most, rapidly ascending the ranks of the security services eventually to command the most sensitive section within foreign intelligence. His unit, the First Directorate’s 10^th Section, was unique in keeping no material record of its activities, its few dozen officers as opaque as the agents they ran. Its tasking was equally opaque, no narrower than the national interest, interpreted as its leadership saw fit. It was free to recruit officers outside the Party, concerning itself only with the breadth and magnitude of their powers, their ability to rise to positions of influence in foreign lands.

Though the kind of man, I thought, for whom propless S&M was the instinctive form of sexual expression, the covert violence of his actions was no source of their motivation. Like others of his profession, he talked neither about what he did nor about what he did not, even now, many decades after it had ceased to matter. Charm was his principal weapon: not the kind one pleasantly notices, but the kind one learns, in time, anxiously to miss. He knew action to be a vector sum, attenuated by opposing the wills of others, amplified by subverting them to align with one’s own. So Zhivata’s friends—as he called them—were above all fishers of men—and women.

But the means are less interesting than the aims, still less than the motivation behind them. A social order built on ideology would seem to need ideology to destroy. Yet on both sides ideology was here the instrument of simpler, primordial drives. The face of communism was plain envy, lashes heavy with a mascara of sympathy, lips stained with fake justice, skin caked in the grey powder of equality. The ideas merely both drew attention to, and concealed, that base appeal, themselves as ultimately irrelevant as any chat-up line. Zhivata had no illusions substituting the capitalist face of greed would be any better, nor applying the ideological make-up with greater finesse. His sole concern needed no special ideas to express: it was simply continuity.

There had lived here for thirteen hundred years a distinctive, cohesive people, surviving through one cataclysm after another, a victim of its geography: the narrow crossroad between east and west. The greatest cataclysm of all—Ottoman rule—lasted for five hundred years, annihilation in all but name. Now brought into the penumbra of the Soviet empire, it was facing arguably the most dangerous kind of assimilation: into a culture superficially kin with its own. When the lines are blurred it is easy to traverse them, to travel much further than appearances betray, arriving at nonetheless sharply alien a final destination. The Soviets wanted to make their vassal state a slave: a trivial change, rationally, but emotionally seismic.

So if Zhivata was driven by nationalism, it would be hard to think of a less vicious kind: its objective, after all, was merely to keep the nation inside the edge of extinction. But like all emotions—and it is an emotion—the desire for continuity is easy to ridicule when one’s circumstances are fortunate enough rarely to evoke it. It is conventionally perceived to be a primitive urge, reflective of a failure to appreciate our commonalities, a synoptic blindness to the trans-national essence of humanity. Yet the belief in the fundamental interchangeability of men, though laden with rationalisations, has no less emotional an origin: a blend of sympathy and fairness. It is merely that our intellectual equipment is better suited to expressing it: the core material is the same, the ideas are more easily carved into one than the other. Is that because a desire for continuity is less receptive to ideas, less mature, less sophisticated?

Receptivity, maturity, sophistication and Zhivata were far from strangers. He was not what the continentals admiringly—and the English pejoratively—call an intellectual, but only because to rationalise one’s existence in explicit terms is to render it unbearably crude, formulaic, mechanical. It is not that he could not produce a manifesto: to follow a manifesto is to close one’s mind to alternatives, in the immature, unsophisticated manner of an adolescent. Ideas, to his mind, simply fall short of life, at least those that seek to express it in general principles.

I thought silently, as he spoke, of the form an intellectual defence of local continuity would take. It has a cause not a reason, and a biological cause at that. The reproductive process does not shuffle the genetic deck at each generation merely to identify the best combination, for it would have otherwise evolved a way of marking the best cards to guarantee an ever stronger hand. Rather, it deliberately diversifies individuals, hedges its bets on a grand scale, knowing “best” can only have a meaning here and now. Though a fine balance must be struck between maintaining diversity by keeping genetic material local, and maintaining exchange of successful genetic elements across the global population, the evolutionary optimum is clearly not the perfectly homogeneous soup most natural to our intellectual minds. So far from parochial, historical, arbitrary, it is a concern hard-coded into life itself. The conflict between localism and globalism will always persist because it serves biology to keep it open.

Zhivata would have recoiled from such seemingly crude biological determinism, but only because it is hard to realise the biological functions merely as a hard constraint. The extraordinary polymorphism of historical social forms is no argument against it, for as long as they stay within its boundaries, the forms of life may take arbitrary shape. Only the boundaries may not be transgressed, as communist internationalism discovered, and as capitalist globalism is discovering now. That the resistance to transgression has no ideological voice does not make it weaker, only harder to see coming. Few saw it come in Zhivata’s time, fewer still in our time and another place–America–built on a cold, unsentimental, mechanical rationality many believed too sophisticated to be overcome by brute instinct.

Nor need it ever have a voice. In the explanation of human behaviour, the question marks usually stop long before those trying to place them do. Or, rather, they shift to another domain where our familiar intellectual tools have no purchase. The critical action moves into shadow, what we see is ever less of what is actually there. But to understand this, you need Wittgenstein to be your sun, from dawn to dusk, for decades, and few can cope with his kind of light.

***

I knew Ludwig Wittgenstein as a maker of things long before I knew him as a destroyer of ideas. Zhivata had charged my father with creating a Bulgarian cultural centre in Vienna, then—the mid-seventies—the center of the dark conflict between east and west. My father had chosen the house Wittgenstein had designed and built for his sister in the 1920s, inexplicably neglected into disrepair by the Austrian government. It is the only piece of architecture Wittgenstein conceived, an embodiment of his thought and spirit, and it is the space in which my conscious life began, my father having unwisely acquired a wife a year or so before becoming the centre’s founding director. An imprint of the greatest European mind, the house was now an outpost of its most marginal civilisation.

Few acknowledge Wittgenstein’s centrality to philosophical thought. It is bad to make your predecessors look small, unforgivable to rob all successors even of the possibility of greatness. Wittgenstein’s genius consisted above all in showing that thought fails silently as we cross the boundaries of sense. No alarm sounds, no warning jolt is felt, we merely move imperceptibly into the realm of fantasy. To feel on the brink of a brilliant generalisation, on the threshold of some grand conceptual discovery, is almost invariably to have unknowingly crossed that line. More clinician than logician, Wittgenstein revealed intellectual grandeur to be no more than hallucination, a constitutional disease of human thought.

Insufferable, you might say, right or wrong. But before you race to condemn him, let us consider why he felt the argument needed making. The answer—made physical in his architecture—is the opposite of what one might superficially think, and radically changes the emotional grounds for objecting to it (there are none other). Its consequences mattered in his time—the greatest European crisis of the 20^th century—they mattered in Zhivata’s time decades later, and they matter now, as we feel the contemporary political world slip from our rational grip.

At a casual glance, Wittgenstein’s house is merely eerily prescient of post-war industrial minimalism. Externally, we see an ordered assembly of unadorned intersecting cuboids, the physicality conceding nothing to purity of geometric form. Internally, the austere simplicity continues, leaving the eye with no purchase beyond outline proportion. The design seems slave to only one master, the physics of inanimate matter, wholly indifferent to the humanity it is supposed to enclose. Such spirit as there is here seems lost to a cult of engineering, its pieties perversely object-sexual. We seem witness to a game of power the architect has made impossible to lose against his client by illicitly awarding all the points to a third party: the material supposed to be in play between them.

But look deeper and you will see the surface impression is wrong. There is no denying the geometric purity of the forms. But that they are bare of obvious ornament does not make them bereft of detail. Rather, the detail is partly distributed across them, conveyed in the complexity of their multi-scale relations, and partly condensed into the margins, focused on their animated features. Crucially, neither form nor detail is here dictated by material or manufacture: Wittgenstein is “faithful” to neither, for they are wholly his. The architect is here not a midwife, delivering material into a life fundamentally shaped by its own genes, but a prosthetic surgeon, transforming inanimate substance into human form.

So his floors are not made of natural stone, cut with sympathy to its grain, but artificial slabs formed in geometries individually tailored to each independent space. The ironwork does not bare its engineering, demanding rightful exposure for its nuts and bolts, but wraps it inside smooth forms of all-enveloping humanity. There are no concessions to building efficiency: so as to keep them monolithic, the ground-floor window shutters are single sheets of steel that disappear into the ground, effortlessly suspended on concealed counter-balanced weights. To reinforce the complete subjugation of the mechanical to the human, the radiators are sadistically bent into the corners, the one exposed piece of engineering reminding the others to know their place.

To treat materials in this way is not to set them beside an abstracted “space” and “light” so favoured by his successors, but to give them a wholly different kind of attention. Nor is it to make any general claim about how they should be pressed into service: the solutions here may be illustrative to others, but they are local, specific to a here and now. “Work on philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)”.

The material is tortured, but to what purpose? It is slave to the architect, but is not also the inhabitant? That the visual and tactile vocabulary is so compressed does not make the architecture speak in abstract slogans for which the building is merely mouthpiece. The tone is deferential, suggesting a mode of architectural understanding to be acquired above all in the use of the space, in which the dogmatic, the prescriptive, the coercive have no room to develop. Ornament is not, for Wittgenstein, a crime but invites crime unless its boundaries are defined, its continuities with life established. But its crudely enforced absence certainly is a crime, for it arbitrarily removes the “link function” between space and life, or reduces it to a crude brutalising operator. A building is no more machine than life itself is mechanical. “Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. Just as little as every functional building is architecture.” Carlo Scarpa, though he built almost as little, shows something of that same understanding in the meticulous details of his fluidly humanised engineering, applied to buildings that would otherwise seem under the dogma of geometry.

No, the economy of Wittgenstein’s architecture is there to give greater freedom to the inhabitant, while nonetheless setting down a language in which this freedom can be creatively exercised. He is austere not because he lacks the charm or imagination to be richly elaborate but because he wants to leave space for your charm and imagination, generously assuming they can match his. And he does this in a vocabulary others cannot use with oppressive intent, for its grammar precludes it. “My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.”

Let us return now to the world of ideas. You will likely recall Wittgenstein as a thinker tediously preoccupied with the connection between reality and language, the seemingly inconsequential link between the world and how we choose to speak about it. We naturally see language as a pair of imperfect spectacles, occasionally distorting the view, but according to knowable rules of optics we can learn to undistort it. We see ourselves on the same analogy, believing mankind to be comprehensively surveyable, if only we could find the right vantage point, and the right intellectual equipment. That our powers limit the sharpness of the picture does not mean we cannot get the bare outlines right, the fundamental superstructure, from which we can make projections about the future, and about the consequences of our actions on ourselves and on the world. Or so, at least, it seems.

Wittgenstein showed this conception to be mistaken. Our means of understanding the world are less like distorting spectacles than impossibly narrow aperture filters, constraining our view to localities whose higher order relations remains opaque. When directed at ourselves they moreover turn into partial mirrors, blending projection and reflection in a way it is outside our powers to deconvolve. Worst of all, the resultant pictures seem intelligible and coherent: because they are so locally. But when extrapolated to another scale, when they are turned into abstractions, they fail, and the failure is only known when the predicted future never arrives.

All we can do, then, is to keep abstraction at bay, resist it at every turn, use our analytic powers above all against themselves, for they are overwhelmingly likely to go wrong when extended beyond their familiar boundaries. And when others, in their vain pursuit of grandeur, insist on imposing their abstractions on us, as the political ideologues of the 20th century so spectacularly did, it will end in blood and tears, however appealing the ideas might seem.

So Wittgenstein says, you might object. Is not his saying so the grandest, most abstract generalisation of all? Perhaps, but unlike any of his predecessors or successors, his conception is reflected in the underlying biology. For whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we are biological creatures, subject to the hard constraints of our fundamental nature. Inside the brain there reigns chaos; outside the brain chaos shall also reign, under the surface appearance of order.